[Workers flipped the script on the e-commerce giant by turning
anti-union tactics into organizing opportunities.]
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HOW WORKERS USED AMAZON’S CAPTIVE AUDIENCE MEETINGS AGAINST THE
COMPANY  
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Sarah Lazare
April 4, 2022
In These Times - Labor
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_ Workers flipped the script on the e-commerce giant by turning
anti-union tactics into organizing opportunities. _

Amazon workers celebrate following the April 1, 2022, vote for the
unionization of the Amazon Staten Island warehouse in New York. ,
ANDREA RENAULT/AFP via Getty Images

 

Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y., astonished the world last week
when they voted to form the first-ever U.S. union at the e‑commerce
behemoth, which is known for ferociously opposing its workers’
efforts to organize. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won the
effort at the JFK8 fulfillment center, had been targeted by such
anti-union efforts, and its co-founder, Chris Smalls, had been called
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​“not smart or articulate” by Amazon officials. (Smalls
co-founded the union after he was fired for organizing for safer
conditions during the pandemic.)

Workers and organizers across the country are looking to this campaign
for lessons on how to overcome such aggressive tactics from Amazon,
which has long proved difficult to organize. As of Friday there were
2,654 votes at the JFK8 warehouse in favor of joining the union and
2,131 opposed (67 ballots have been challenged). With a separate
union drive in Bessemer, Ala. too close to call
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and unions across the country eyeing future unionization efforts, many
labor advocates hope that the Staten Island victory will inspire other
workers to take similar action.

_In These Times_ spoke with two workers about a key tactic they used:
turning Amazon’s union-busting against the company. Justine Medina
is 32 years old and has been working at the JFK8 warehouse since
September, first as a counter, then as a packer. Medina, who is
a member of the Communist Party and chair of the New York Young
Communist League, started working as a salt, which means she became
a worker at the warehouse to help with the union effort. Tristan
Dutchin, 27 years old, who goes by the nickname Lion, started working
at JFK8 in March 2021, and joined ALU in April. A picker for Amazon,
he also wrote and performed a cover
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classic labor song ​“Union Train” specifically for the
Amazon campaign.

Y’ALL HAVE SHOCKED THE WORLD BY VOTING TO FORM A UNION AT AMAZON,
ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL CORPORATIONS IN THE WORLD. HOW DOES IT FEEL?

TRISTAN DUTCHIN: It’s a life-changing situation. I went from being
a regular Amazon worker to being in the media. I joined this
miraculous, wonderful group that has changed my life. It’s a great
experience, we’re here to fight the good fight. It’s very mind
blowing. The dedication and time we put into it has really paid off.
This is a moment I’m really proud of.

JUSTINE MEDINA: It’s still incredibly surreal. Really. The Amazon
slogan is, ​“Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” We would always
bandy that slogan around, and say: ​“We’re doing it, Jeff!”
But you know what, we did it. This is a world-changing moment, led by
the workers. 

I was inspired to get involved as a salt in this campaign because
I heard about what the workers were doing, and saw they were doing it
with a new union, building their own union. That’s why it changed
the world: It was a very grassroots, very working-class,
salt-of-the-earth, Black-led union drive. That’s what scared the
Amazon executives more than anything.

TRISTAN, TELL ME WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO GET INVOLVED IN ALU.

TRISTAN: Ever since I started working, I’ve been getting a lot of
write ups from managers and supervisors. They would come at me and
harass me, say ​“we want you to go as fast as possible, want you
to reach a high expected rate.” You’re like a machine. You
can’t leave to go nowhere, to stretch your legs, clear your mind, or
drink water. I did that one time and got written up. I got another
write up for being late to my station. 

The warehouse is big, you don’t always know where you’re going,
and they don’t give you a map. It got me frustrated. I left work
and saw a group of guys [affiliated with ALU] with a big tent. The
first guy I met was [ALU leader] Derrick Palmer. He discussed with me
what the union was, gave me his experience and other workers’
experience of getting written up and harassed. I wanted to be part of
something that would benefit the other workers.

AMAZON IS KNOWN FOR ITS VICIOUS AND HIGH-DOLLAR UNION-BUSTING
CAMPAIGNS. BUT I READ A GREAT INTERVIEW
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WITH WORKER ANGELIKA MALDONADO IN _JACOBIN_ WHERE SHE DESCRIBED USING
SOME OF THEIR UNION-BUSTING TACTICS AGAINST THEM — LIKE GOING
INTO CAPTIVE AUDIENCE MEETINGS, WHEN UNINVITED. CAN YOU DESCRIBE HOW
COMMON THIS WAS AND WHAT IT WAS LIKE? WHY DID IT SEEM TO
BE EFFECTIVE?

JUSTINE: They started captive audience meetings initially in the fall
after we filed the first petition. But then we had to withdraw the
petition, and they kept them going a little while then stopped them.
They were like, ​“Oh, we’re done with that.” But then once our
second petition was accepted, they restarted captive audiences right
away, around early February. We were like, ​“We need to push back
immediately and make our presence known. We need to start demanding
time in these captive audience meetings to tell our side.” 

So when they brought them back, we were ready to come together. At
first they didn’t want to let us in. Some of us said ​“you have
to let us in,” and asked the union buster who was blocking the door,
​“What’s your name, show us your worker identification badge. Do
you work here?” Being just as antagonistic to them as they’re
being to us. We were well within our rights. 

At the Amazon workplace, you’re not actually allowed in unless you
have a badge, unless you are a worker there. It’s funny, because
at Amazon’s new-hire orientation, they encourage you to be on the
lookout for things like that — to ​“have a backbone and
commit.” We were like, alright.

So then we went in, marched in, made a bit of a disruption, sat
down, and then we would interrupt with questions, and answer [other]
questions. We decided that at the next captive audience meeting,
we’re not going to be disruptive. It seemed to throw people off. We
said, ​“let’s sit here respectfully and ask questions.” The
general manager had been called in and said we were insubordinate and
couldn’t be there, and if we didn’t leave we would get in trouble.
I was like, ​“We are protected by law to be here and we know
that.” We were glancing around at each other, and we were spread
throughout the room. A few of us were thinking, ​“Are they going
to call the cops?” Other workers were whispering about whether they
were going to call the cops. And then eventually, they knew we
weren’t leaving so they ended that session. 

We would sometimes try to get onto sessions when we weren’t on the
list. There was a lead organizing team of about a dozen people in
JFK8, and then the organizing committee that had more people in its
periphery — more than 100 people. Through those channels we
would try to make sure that anyone in that meeting would speak up, say
something. [We told people:] ​“If you’re invited into a captive
audience meeting, talk back.” We always had someone in there. If
they were scheduled to be in there already, even better, because then
you can’t kick them out. 

By the final weeks leading up to the vote, they started kicking people
out. They said ​“you’re not allowed in if you’re not supposed
to be here.” We would try to do it anyway. We were demanding to be
heard as a union, but we did so politely. We realized from the first
time that workers responded better to that. They saw our being
disruptive as disrespectful. So we tried to be polite. We wanted to
explain our side. 

A lot of workers themselves who weren’t necessarily ​“yes”
voters or were on the fence would raise their hands and say, ​“Why
won’t you let someone from the union speak up about what’s going
on? Why don’t you let them say their side?” We would help push
that idea, whenever captive audiences came up in one-on-one
conversations in the warehouse. We would say ​“we think they
should let us have a meeting too.” We would talk about that,
agitate. Workers would bring that up on their own.

TRISTAN: Amazon would call myself and other workers to mandatory
meetings. They were very anti-worker. They said, ​“Don’t trust
the ALU. They will get your signatures, get your money.” I would
sit down for a good 10 minutes and then walk out. I didn’t want
to be in an environment that speaks negatively about a group I’m
affiliated with. I didn’t want the tension to go out of control.
I’m a person of peace. I don’t like confrontation.

Some workers would come up to me in a more negative, hostile way and
give me hard questions about who our union representatives are, what
kind of union negotiations we are under. I would say, ​“Go talk
to my union comrades, they will give you more insight and info on what
we stand for and represent.” 

SO IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU NOT ONLY USED THE ACTUAL MEETINGS AS AN
ORGANIZING OPPORTUNITY, BUT USED THE FACT THAT THE MEETINGS WERE
HAPPENING AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO AGITATE ON THE SHOP FLOOR.

JUSTINE: If you asked people, ​“Do you know about the union drive
going on?” they’d say, ​“Yeah, I had this meeting.” These
meetings were going on every day, every hour. People had to go to them
once a week and sit through them for 30 minutes to an hour. People
would appreciate being able to sit down and not have to work, but at
the same time they thought the meetings were bullshit.

DO YOU THINK THE CAPTIVE AUDIENCE MEETINGS HELPED PUBLICIZE THE
UNION DRIVE?

JUSTINE: [Laughs] Absolutely. Especially in the fall. Amazon didn’t
even want to use the word ​“union.” In their initial captive
audience meetings in the fall, they didn’t even use that word. They
didn’t want to plant that word in people’s heads. They said a
​“third party” is coming in.

CALLING WORKERS WHO WANT A UNION A THIRD PARTY IS A PRETTY CLASSIC
ANTI-UNION TACTIC. HOW DID WORKERS COUNTER THAT? 

JUSTINE: We said we are not a third party, we work here. People
pushed back against the anti-union narrative so much they sometimes
had to end sessions early, due to workers who weren’t even on the
organizing committee in a peripheral way. That’s why we were
confident. On the outside, people said ​“you only have 30%” [on
the side of the union]. We said, ​“You don’t
understand — we have more than that.” 

WHAT OTHER AMAZON UNION-BUSTING TACTICS WERE YOU ABLE TO USE AGAINST
THE COMPANY?

JUSTINE: We tried to use all of them. Their own propaganda campaign of
voting ​“no” — the posters around the warehouse every few
feet — people would get annoyed with that, and we would lean
into that. We filed ULPs (Unfair Labor Practices). Every time we’d
file, we would tell people that Amazon is breaking the law, that this
is union busting. We knew that in order to win, we had to do intense
worker education the entire time. We said that they were doing illegal
stuff, doing union busting. We would hand out articles about the union
busting that Amazon was doing, and then when they arrested the
organizers last November, and in February when they arrested three
others, we made a flier about what happened, and a petition for
workers to sign. I got thousands of them printed out. We immediately
used all that info we could against them.

There is one thing we did that I think is pretty unique. We treated
this like you would treat an electoral campaign. There were anywhere
from 5,000 to 8,000 workers, depending on how many were hired at the
time. That’s why we were public about it from the beginning.
There’s no way to do one-on-ones with thousands as a rag-tag,
scrappy team, especially at the very beginning when it was Derrick
Palmer and Chris Smalls. We got a NationBuilder account, and used
that to track people. We sent everyone emails about what was going on,
and text blasts explaining when Amazon was doing union busting. We
used their propaganda against them with our own design. 

Amazon treats the workers like they’re idiots. Amazon management is
very condescending to workers there. We knew we had to educate people
about how this is something companies do all the time.

TRISTAN: We’ve been able to stand our ground against Amazon putting
anti-union posts all over the warehouse. They were calling, emailing
and sending mail to people’s homes, encouraging workers to vote
​“no,” saying we are not to be trusted, we are the threat. We
are not. We are more of an independent group. 

I do think Amazon’s anti-union tactics backfired. At the end of the
day, we’re going to have to keep pushing ourselves to put an end to
all the cruel tactics they’re using against us. Amazon makes so much
money every day. Their main motive against the union is they don’t
want to pay workers more, but they get paid every day. It would be
fair for workers to get compensated more and be given a fair shot.
I’m very cautious and careful. I don’t want them to come at me as
a target. I give people respect the same way they respect me.

The anti-union flyers were very childish. They said, ​“Your voice.
Your vote. Vote no.” If it’s their voice, why are you pushing this
narrative and telling them to vote ​“no”? Shouldn’t it be the
workers’ decision how to vote? It’s an act of desperation. Like
what a child would do if they want candy you tell them no. It’s all
propaganda and lies.

Sarah Lazare [[link removed]] is web
editor and reporter for _In These Times_. She tweets at @sarahlazare
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* Amazon Workers; Union Organizing
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